meant anything.  Few things impress the imagination more powerfully than the sense of the forces that have surrounded man from his first appearance on the earth, and that have been noted and utilized only in recent times.  There stands the immemorial force, and men have had no eyes for it till yesterday.  Thoughtful men begin to look upon the environment in a new spirit.  They begin to walk within it in amazement and hope.  All the forces of the material universe are here, and only a few things about them have been discovered.  The natural environment is rich beyond all calculation or dream; it is exhaustless.  Here in the field of man’s life is the alluring object of science.  Here in the natural situation are the everlasting and benign energies that wait to be discovered and prest into human service.  There is a human environment, and all the fundamental truth about man has been present in it from the start.  Moses gave his nomadic brethren the ten words; but they were written in the human heart ages before they were inscribed upon stone.  The great Hebrew prophets gave to the world the vision of one God, His righteous government of the world, and His election of a single race for the service of all the races; but God and His government and His method in the education of man were real and mighty before Amos, and Hosea, and Isaiah, and Jeremiah beheld them.  Christ revealed the Father through His own divine Sonhood; but the Fatherhood of God is an eternal truth.  Nowhere is the divineness of Christ more obvious than in the ease and adequacy with which He, and He alone, is able to read the meaning of the human situation.  Christ as Prophet, as Seer and Discoverer, is most amazing to the most gifted.  His eye for fact is divine.  He notes the falling sparrow, and at once reaches the universal fatherly foresight and control of God.  His consuming vision goes everywhere, turning the hidden truth of life into light and joy in His parables.  His teaching is revelation, the unveiling of the aboriginal divine order.  He makes nothing; He reveals what God made.  And when He increases life it is by showing the path to that increase ordained of God, insight and obedience.  The will of God is the final law for heaven and earth; the vision of it and surrender to it are the path of life.  Here we touch the depth of the old faith.  God the Father creates, and the Son reveals.  The order of the Spirit is eternal; the revelation of it is in time and for sense-bound men.  Here we see in a mirror and dimly; there they behold face to face.  And Christ drew forth into light the divine significance of man’s life, as God originally made it; and that divine meaning of existence thus drawn out is the gospel of Christ.

In the text we are carried by a true seer back of all traditions, behind all conventions, beyond all beliefs about life to life itself as it lies in its own freshness and fulness.  We are led to look upon human life newly made, still warm with the touch of the creative hand, and yet containing in it that very hour all that the Lord eventually drew out of it.  If the first man had understood himself he would have been essentially a Christian.  And therefore I propose to evolve from the original human situation, as described in the text, the outline of what I take to be a great faith.